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Indexed News on:

--the California "Mega-Park" Project

Tracking measurable success on efforts across California to preserve and connect our Parks & Wildlife CorridorsWE POST NEWS THREE WAYS:1. long detailed stories on blogspot (here!)2. short messages on Twitter3. automated news feeds from CA enviro websites in the right-hand column which change frequently and are not archived by our website (that's why we now have a twitter account to permanently capture the memorable feeds)

VISIONS OF CONNECTED OPEN SPACES

5/2007

Our Goal is 1000 miles of preserved and connected open spaces in our
State, instead of 500 miles of sprawl from San Diego to Sacramento.
California could have a 1000-mile-long mega-park
from Oregon to the Mexican border with permanently preserved farmland
greenbelts around every major city, with connected open space rings that
link the entire state together. Think it'll never happen? It already
is. Read the success stories on our website!

Chapter
3: "As of 1996, the 35 California counties for which detailed land
supply data are available—including all of the state's urban counties
(see Exhibit 12)—included
approximately 3.5 million acres of urbanized land...and nearly 25
million acres of physically-developable raw land....
Among the 35 counties listed in Exhibit 13,
the effect of excluding wetlands and prime and unique farmlands (i.e.,
moving from Category #4 to Category #5) would be to reduce the supply of
developable land from 17.3 to 12.8 million acres. Excluding Q3
floodzones (Category #6) would further reduce developable land supplies
to 11.6 million acres. If special natural areas identified by the
California Department of Fish and Game (Category #7a) were prohibited
from being developed, the supply of developable land would fall to 9.9
million acres. Excluding sites with an Endangered Species Index of 40 or
more (Category #7b) would reduce developable land supplies to 8.2
million acres".

(NOTE: THIS MEANS AN INCREASE IN URBAN SPRAWL FROM 3.5 MILLION ACRES TO 11.7 MILLION ACRES)

....
reducing this to areas within 1 Mile of Existing Urbanization,
excluding Wetlands, Prime and Unique Farmlands, and Floodzones would
allow another 2.4 million acres of urban sprawl in California (see
exhibit 13) "

IS THIS WHAT WE WANT?NO!

WHAT WE WANT IS 1000 MILES OF CONNECTED PARKS FROM OREGON TO THE MEXICAN BORDER

"The
map shown here is a bare bones, simplified map that leaves out some
less vital linkages, which have been or will be included in more
detailed wildlands network designs, and that leaves out much of the
landscape permeability on public lands that will provide essential
connectivity.

Also left out are many large cores and core
complexes along with linkages that will form wildlands networks for
parts of the West that, while extremely important in and of themselves,
are not as critical for continental wildlife movement. "

Another group founded by the same people as the Rewilding Institute, the Wildlands Project,
describe this vision: "Our vision is Room to Roam, and lots of it. We
must connect parks and protected areas from Canada to Mexico, from the
Pacific to the Atlantic."
--------------------------------------------

Here's the California Tomorrow Plan, proposed in 1971.It
envisioned conservation zones stretching from Los Angeles to San
Francisco, in addition to already preserved National Forests and Federal
desert lands in the eastern part of the state. The plan also included
"regional reserve" lands described as a "general use- conservation". (The
California Tomorrow Plan, editted by Alfred Heller, was published by
William Kaufman, Inc. and can be purchased at Amazon.com)

The Los Angeles-area Rim of the Valley Trail System and its Parklands Lands are being purchased by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, http://smmc.ca.gov/ and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, http://mrca.ca.gov/

Pictured
above is the biggest development threat between the sprawl of Los
Angeles and the Central Valley, the proposed Tejon Ranch mega-city. If
built, it would sever the wildlife corridors between the Siera Nevada
mountains and the Coast ranges in Ventura and Santa Barbara Countieshttp://savetejonranch.org/

AN
EXCERPT: "On low-rise commercial avenues and boulevards like Ventura,
La Brea and Pico, developers suddenly found that by adding housing, they
could blow past the growth limits voters established under Proposition U
(In 1986). Prop. U, after all, only capped the size of commercial and
industrial buildings.

The results can be seen all over the city,
with construction pits and steel girders marking where the development
rules have abruptly changed...County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who
campaigned for Prop. U, has a more skeptical view, saying the Department
of City Planning found a way to circumvent the electorate.

“There’s
nothing elegant about busting the limits that have been in place on the
Westside, that I got in place in my district,” Yaroslavsky says. “And
it isn’t elegant to the people who thought they were protected by the
restraints we put in place 20 years ago in those neighborhoods.”

Eight
thousand housing units — accommodating thousands of new residents —
have been approved in the past three years using the new smart-growth
zoning, says Jane Blumenfeld, a 16-year veteran of the planning
department. To help her employees understand where she believes that
zoning makes sense, Blumenfeld created a map that shows every place in
Los Angeles that sits within 1,500 feet of a major transit stop — that
is, a transit stop at which a bus or train arrives every 15 minutes
during afternoon rush hour....

The map is, to put it mildly, jarring.
On it, nearly every boulevard north of the Santa Monica Freeway and
south of the Santa Monica Mountains and Hollywood Hills appears as
though it could be converted to smart-growth zoning. A huge swath of
South Los Angeles and several pockets of the San Fernando Valley are
also prime candidates.

Why? Because nearly every boulevard has a
bus. “We want to build housing near transit, as opposed to building it
where there’s no ability to reach transit,” says Blumenfeld, who
oversees citywide planning strategies. “South of the mountains, there’s
pretty much transit everywhere.”

(click on map to enlarge)

OUR RESPONSE:

David Zahniser's article was right on!

It’s
simply obscene that some of L.A. City’s elected officials and city
planners think that we can continue to pack millions more people into
L.A. and then solve the added traffic problems with more buses. That
they believe nearly every major street in L.A. should go high density
shows they have no connection to the residents of this town.

This
kind of urban apocalypse doesn’t need to happen. We don’t have to
convert our communities into wall to wall highrises. We also don’t have
to let our state be 500 miles of sprawl, from San Diego to Sacramento.
We could instead be a state with a 1000 mile long mega-park system from
Oregon to the Mexican border with permanently preserved farmland
greenbelts around every major city, with connected open space rings that
link the entire state together. Think it can’t happen? It already is.
Read the success stories on our website, http://www.connectingcalifornia.org.

Communities
and cities around California are not falling for the mantra that
“growth is always good”. Instead many are drawing lines and saying no
more paving of our farmland and wetlands or chopping down our forests.
The growth that they choose to allow is targeted for city centers. Most
of the rest of this state doesn’t want their towns to look like
L.A.—wall to wall concrete. And as a lifelong L.A. resident, I’m tired
of this town looking like that too. We can and must retrofit this city
to make it more liveable—but livability and economic vitality can happen
without opening the floodgates to mega development everywhere.

Smart
Growth has been discredited as a believable urban strategy simply
because, as Zahnizer points out, the phrase has been misused so much by
developers that it has no meaning. Smart Growth in practice is often
Dumb growth.

Smart growth has as its base the core belief that
growth can never be stopped. It’s a disease that has afflicted
politicians in this region for decades: the belief that continuous
growth can always be accommodated. Smart Growth as a concept simply
ignores major realities: our streets are full and there’s no more room
to add more buses; we are losing our water supply due to growth
elsewhere and due to global warming; paving over even more of our city
and building ever higher is no guarantee that elected officials will
stop our city from sprawling into Bakersfield or Las Vegas. Growth is a
never ending circle of problems needing solutions that create their own
set of problems. When you widen a highway, does traffic get better or
does the city use this as an excuse to approve more developments which
then fills up the space, creating the need for even more widened roads?

Smart
growth is championed by developer think tanks whose propaganda is ever
changing: sometimes we’re not building enough office and industrial
buildings. After they get their way, they say we’re not building enough
housing for those who’ll work in all that “needed” industrial space. The
growth cycle continues.

It’s hilarious that so many advocates of
a dense L.A. live in low or ultra low density neighborhoods far away
from the traffic disasters they are pushing for. I remember how in the
1990’s the president of the Playa Vista company, Nelson Rising, lectured
residents that “the era of the single family quarter acre home is
over”. He, of course, lived 20 miles away from his massive project in a
multi-acre mansion in La Canada.

Playa Vista was originally sold
to the west L.A. community on the promise that there would be streets
full of ground floor retail with apartments and condos on top to
encourage “walkability” and to discourage the 7000 new residents from
having to leave the project and jam up area traffic. “Live, work and
play in Playa Vista” was the promise. But with their promised mixed-use
neighborhood 95% done, instead of 22 mixed use buildings we have 3.
Smart growth was a sales pitch that never came true.

Smart Growth
for our region is simply no solution as long as politicians continue to
refuse to consider limits on development and population growth. Some
development boosters say a city that doesn’t grow will die. What a load
of crap! Slowing down or halting growth is not stagnation, it’s
stability. It’s living within our means.

In L.A. we need to change our civic planning policies to deal with existing needs not future developer needs.

Let’s build elevated light rail lines
alongside every freeway; no more added traffic lanes for cars, buses and
other polluters. Elevated means the land below can be parks for our
existing residents, which are in real short supply in L.A., or treatment
wetlands for urban runoff (as Judith Lewis described in her L.A. Weekly
cover story last November, http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/the-lost-streams-of-los-angeles/14973/
). The rail lines will not compete with cars for space on the roads,
and if the rail lines go everywhere the freeways go, we have the
potential to remove a lot of traffic from the freeways. As long as we
have rail links and stops at the major job centers, we can make rail be
competitive with solo car driving.

Finally, let’s halt sprawl by
finishing the greenbelt around Los Angeles that has been created by the
Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. Let’s buy the Tejon Ranch, the
biggest proposed sprawl development between L.A. and Bakersfield to the
north. Let’s choose to live within our means rather than continue to
burst at the seams.